Ship Modification!

IDEA:
MORE MODDING FOR SHIPS
– BAYS
– CARGO HOLDS
– MORE FLEXIBILITY FOR UPGRADES
– PREDETERMINED UPGRADE ‘MODULES’

Alright, so ship modifications. Right now, I think the system is a little restrictive. I’m pretty sure I’ve made some of these suggestions before, but I figure what the hell.

What I’d like to see is more flexibility for ship modifications. As it stands, we’re given a ship and it’s predetermined what it can and can’t have on it. To a degree, that’s something we just can’t change, but there are some things we could do. For instance, when a new ship type is coming into production, you could flag a room [b:1enjij29]cargo & hangar[/b:1enjij29], and then give the player the option of installing cargo bays or a landing bay (or neither if they want lots of quota space). That way, depending on what they want installed, any ship with enough space could become either or.

I’d also like to see more flexibility in what can go where. I know that we’re limited in speed/hyperspeed etc because of the advancements later on in the TL, but why can’t we control this in a different way? I propose a new system involving premade parts. We could have pre-assembled sublight/hyperdrives that take up a set amount of quota to install, that way we still limit the amount of speed achievable during a certain period in the TL, but give people the option of maxing out their older ships with new technology. The same could be done with weapons. Rather than have a person just randomly upgrade and the parts come from nowhere, make it so people are required to buy weapons from engineering or even government factions. That way, the military could have more powerful weaponry, and the potential for underground markets and smuggling/pirating factions dealing in weaponry of that sort could appear.

And a similar system would be cool for shields/armor as well. Purchasing different armors/shieldings from different people might give different results. Ships could seriously nerf their own shielding to stack armor, or the other way around if they wanted to. There’d be more variation in the ships that are in-game, and I think it’d make space a whole lot more interesting.

I’m also open to suggestions concerning turrets, since I’m kinda stumped on that one.

What about turrets has you stumped? If you are proposing a complete overhaul to the nature of buildship, just do the same thing with turrets as everything else.

I guess you could do that. It’d look kinda silly not having a turret there when it says ‘TURRET’ though. Then you could separate all the different turrets into classes. Light turrets, blaster turrets, quad-laser turrets, turbolaser batteries, heavy turbolaser batteries, etc.

Well, the primary motivation behind me wanting the min and max for upgradeship (aka the way it is now) is fairly simple.

So that ships are different from each other!

When you have Acclamator cargo ships running around, what’s the point of one theoretically developing a frigate sized cargo ship which is fundamentally different from a warship. So that people will need to learn a different map? Or have a bunch of different descs that only a handful of players will ever actually read. Warships for war, Carriers for large hangars, cargo ships for cargo. That’s my definition of variation <!– s:P –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_razz.gif" alt="" title="Razz" /><!– s:P –>

A freighter would only be able to fit a starfighter, maybe two, max. This wouldn’t make ships equal to eachother, it’d just mean that each ship has more potential for something new. IE, an Acclamator could strip out most of their ship bays and install cargo instead. Or the other way around. Suddenly, there are heavily armored Acclamators, there are squadron-based Acclamators, etc. It would make things a lot more interesting, and give more end-game potential to the older ships that usually get ignored after new ships are developed without nerfing those new ships.

This also gives players the tools to do things that they’re currently dependent on the imms for. I’m in one of those situations right now. T_T

That reminds me of the way ships are in Escape Velocity, in that there’s a bunch of different ships that look different and have different quota, different base stats, and accept different upgrades. You can have a bulk freighter modified for combat/as a carrier instead of being a freighter, but it will never be quite as good as a combat vessel as actual combat vessels. Just like you can modify a combat vessel for cargo but it will never hold as much cargo as a cargo ship of equal quota, because it’s limited to only attaching X cargo bays.

Escape Velocity is where I got the idea from. <!– s:( –><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_sad.gif" alt="" title="Sad" /><!– s:( –> They’ve got such a beautiful system and I think it’d work a whole lot better on our MUD and give a whole other dimension to space, which currently amounts to who’s in a cappie turret and who isn’t.

Hi5 for the EV nerds! Speaking of which, anyone got a mac ROM so I can run an emu? Me love you long time….

Oh, back on topic.

Like I said, sounds awesome. Though it WOULD require a massive re-code of how ships are defined and built. Massive. Gigantonormous. It would be totally worth it though, and unique as far as MUDs go. (as far as I know)

The difference is that there’s different quality of parts that would all fall under &quot;lasers&quot; but some take up more or less quota and are of better or worse quality. It could be just an expansion of the current system but as the only imm to really chime in so far has stated- the staff aren’t particularly interested in letting us put cargobays on our fed cruisers and alien blasters on our shuttlecraft.

I like the suggestion because it adds more depth to ship ownership than &quot;I’ll take a combat-modded whatever&quot;. Instead, the person has options, and rather than just have one engineer sit there and tune it to specs in ten minutes, the player has to travel around and gather the right components to get the ship they want. Look at it as the space version of gear-collecting.

I would like to note…I believe doing things like that, adding/modifying rooms such as cargo bays and hangers, is currently limited by code. I believe the type of ship is defined by a specific file. If you find a variation of that ship, then there is probably a variation of that file. I’m not sure how hard it would be to change the code for something like that, I don’t know this codebase that well enough yet.

I came across a variation of the one of the main cargo ships being sold by Arakyd last TL, I can’t remember the name of it, but somebody had it made specifically by the Imms. It was modified as a medical ship. Pretty sweet too.

On that note though, I would like to modify the inside of my ship. Change the name of some of the rooms, room descriptions, pay money to change the type of room (workshop, factory, bacta, etc). I would love to put down some credits to add a smaller hanger to my freighter to dock my fighter. I hate leaving my ships all over the place. Possibly allow some ships to be blank &quot;blank&quot; until the owner adds descriptions to each room.

Also, when I first joined LOTJ I was looking at the Gather skill, the Combine skill and the Build Ship skill. I was thinking hard core about how cool it would be if I could use higher grade items to make a stronger hull, or a faster engine or whatever when I actually could build a ship. Oh man, was I wrong. But I still think it would be awesome if you could.

I like this idea. ‘Cause it gives a variety of different types of equipment. Governments can even -outlaw- certain parts for Civilian ships and make it possible to open an actual Black Market trade. Hell, it’d even give some clans the ability to strip ships down to their bare components, pick and take what they want and sell/equip their own ships with it.

It could really make it fun. You could even have engineers trying to find components to make components for the ships. Though, as it stands now, I don’t see this going in anytime soon. ‘Cause it’s probably pretty hard to do. It’s a good idea, though.